In many industries, there are a drastic number of different merchants, vendors, service providers, and other entities involved with which a consumer may need to interact. For example, in the music industry, a consumer that purchases music, goes to a concert, and attends a festival may interact with a music retailer, a ticket distributor, the concert venue, a merchant at the concert venue, a second ticket distributor for the festival, the festival organizer, and multiple merchants and vendors at the festival. Each of these entities may have separate websites that may require the consumer to login to access their services, the concert and festival may have their tickets distributed to the consumer via different methods, and each of the vendors and merchants at the festival may accept different payment methods. As a result, in such industries, it may be difficult and overwhelming for a consumer to participate.
Thus, there is a need for a technical solution where services at each vertical level in an industry may be integrated in a unified platform that is also configured to process payment transactions. By providing a system configured to process authentications as well as payment transactions, a consumer experience may be enhanced by enabling a consumer to utilize a single set of authentication credentials, such as a username and password, to access websites and application programs for each merchant associated with the platform, and also use a single payment method accepted throughout the entire platform. In addition, the provision of guaranteed processing for payment transactions and acceptance of a universal payment method, offered by a unified platform, as well as access to authentication services, may be beneficial as it requires less system architecture and processing power for the merchant's application services and devices.